The delivery of controlled substances to patients in a hospital or other medical care environment has long been the subject of attempts at improvement. Initially, the controlled substances were shipped to medical facilities packaged in containers, such as bottles, jars, and the like. These containers were stored at a central pharmacy location. When a doctor required administration of a dose of a controlled substance to a patient, a prescription was written and a nurse was responsible for obtaining the dosage from the pharmacy and administering it to the patient.
In order to effectuate proper inventory control as well as improve security with regard to the controlled substance, the pharmacy was required to manually log the identity of the nurse receiving the medication, the type of medication dispensed, the amount of medication dispensed, the time of release of the medication, and other information necessary for proper inventory control. The nurse was also required to manually record the medication received, the amount of medication delivered, the patient to whom the medication was delivered, and the time the patient received the medication. Furthermore, if the controlled substance was subsequently delivered to the patient after the original nurse's shift was over, the additional nurse would be required to manually record the same type of information regarding her handling of the medication. Thus, it is seen that the administration of a controlled substance to a patient is both labor and time intensive as a commitment of a number of individuals as well as the time involved in manually recording the information regarding the distribution of the medication is required.
More recently, the containers of drugs have been remotely located within the medical facility at stations closer to the patients receiving the medication. In this system, while the pharmacy releases the containers of medicine to the various nurse substation, the inventory information is still required to be recorded. The containers of medicine are then stored behind locked cabinets at each nurse substation with the nurses retrieving the drug from the locked cabinet and administering the drugs to the patients. Of course, the nurses are still required to record the detailed information regarding the types of medication, the amount of medication, the time of administering medication, and other information regarding the administration of the medicine.
While this system of administration more quickly brings the controlled substance to the patient, it suffers from the same drawbacks of the previous system of being labor and time intensive as well as the additional drawback of reducing the security of the controlled substances while they are at the remote locations.
In an effort to improve these systems, various devices have been designed for distributing unit dose medication from an apparatus. While these various apparatus are an improvement over the manual systems previously discussed, such systems are exceedingly large, therefore requiring use in a centralized dedicated location, require use of pharmacy resources and time to properly load and inventory machines, and are dedicated to specific forms of drug to be dispensed. What is thus needed, is a relatively portable drug dispensing apparatus which provides a high level of security for the drugs being dispensed, is sufficiently flexible to all distribution of drugs of varying dosage formats, is easily reloaded with new drug, and reduces the labor and time drawbacks of the prior art. The present invention fulfills these requirements.